New Skin and Another Big Change!

Tuesday October 26th, 1999

The new skin is in the 10-26 builds. Visit our builds page to get the latest. I find myself not minding the whitespace around the sidebar's border as much as I expected I would. However, there is one issue that troubles me. When you move the sidebar's "splitter", instead of moving a "ghost" of the splitter, you move the splitter itself. the problem is that if you're expanding the sidebar, the splitter disengages from the top and bottom border of the sidebar, leaving a white gap. If you shrink the width of the sidebar, the splitter moves past the right edge of the top and bottom borders of the sidebar, and the effect is just as bad. The answer would be to either 1) expand and contract the sidebar in realtime as the splitter is moved (probably slow), or 2) manipulate a "ghost" of the splitter during resize, and when the mouse button is released, move the actual splitter and resize the sidebar.

The second bit of news is that they've made more changes to the "incremental reflow" of the rendering engine. Now, the page will start rendering content even before reaching closing tags. This means a dramatic decrease in the time taken to get content displayed, and it's a great benefit when loading pages with long lists of data. But I find the content shifting disconcerting (check out mozilla.org, mozillazine.org and slashdot.org for examples if you have a 56k connection or slower), and the decrease in scrollbar responsiveness is vexing. Hopefully that will be working on these issues in the coming weeks leading up to the beta.

`The old content sink did content append notifications with a fairly
coarse granularity (only for complete children of the BODY element). As a result, frame creation (and, hence, display) for pages that had the bulk of their content in a single table or some other container was delayed till the entire page loaded.

`With the new changes, frame
creation happens every time we are done with a buffer passed in from the networking library, irrespective of where we are in the content
hierarchy. Subsequent content created by the sink is added more
incrementally to the content model.'